You won't find it widely published. Its the dirty little secret of SSD's.

Yes, the MTBF is extremely high, but the actual failure rates tend to be far higher due to issues with the controller chips and/or firmware failures.

With a HDD you usually get some warning if there is mechanical failure, such as the infamous clicking noise. When an SSD goes there is almost never any warning. Its just gone. Everything on it gone unless you have a backup.

Hard to believe, not the causes but the rates you are trying to claim.

There are all sorts of on-line news sites looking for dirt to pull in readers, take another look at the first review of SSDs, he really slagged some of the drives.

Your claim basic come down to "It's a secret, but trust me!", sorry if it was true then there are too many competitive companies who have a lot to gain presently by exposing the facts.

They were not able to hide the access speed slow-down seen in early drives, it was big news, so how are they hiding a high failure rate?

Again, stop looking at your own companies product, too many data base companies who do not build/sell these drives are buying and testing them in bulk for this to be hidden for long.

How long ago were they made? Even six(6) months makes a big difference in the firmware used inside the drive.

The pauses are probably because the type of SSDs/firmware you use, it is explained why in the above reviews and how to avoid the problems.

On the contrary, these are pauses with the hard disk light off. They also occur at times when no writes are (or at last should) be happening, and I had precisely zero disk performance troubles with the same drive under Linux.

As far as I can tell, the firmware doesn't make as much of a difference as the underlying controller design. The one exception would be TRIM support, which in turn is only relevant if the OS uses it (which WinXP doesn't) and the disk has ever been nearly full.

On the contrary, these are pauses with the hard disk light off. They also occur at times when no writes are (or at last should) be happening, and I had precisely zero disk performance troubles with the same drive under Linux..

Are you sure you have not been rooted then?

I have always hated MS Windows. From Windows 3.11 to Windows 7 I have always noted the big pauses caused by writes to the hard drive, problems that never showed up on my Amigas, Beos or Haiku machines.

Windows in particular is always writing back data to the hard drive, then acting like it never buffered the data, resulting in the system pausing at random.

However, once I added a SSD to my netbook, as far as I can detect all that pausing went away. Note: I am using Window 7 Starter, maybe you have a lot more services running in the background to slow you down, but beware being rooted!